John Battelle:
The web as we know it is rather like our polar ice caps: under severe, long-term attack by forces of our own creation.
— It’s Not Whether Google’s Threatened. It’s Asking Ourselves: What Commons Do We Wish For?.
What really bugs me about this is that I pretty much agree with him.
(Vocabulary reminder for those needing it.)
Groundhog Day Is Worth Revisiting, Wouldn’t You Say? is Chris Lough’s appreciation of the 1993 movie.
Groundhog Day is one of the very few movies I’ve willingly seen more than once, and this essay captures why. I think it’s the only thing I ever liked Bill Murray in (I liked Ghostbusters, but didn’t like him in it; haven’t seen Lost in Translation yet) so I commend the review (and the movie) to you.
Naked Capitalism Blog — which I would currently rank as the most essential reading in blogdom — reports on a study arguing that resistance movements that adopt non-violent methods are substantially more likely to prevail against authoritarian regimes than those movements that turn to violence:
Erica Chenoweth has developed a dataset and analyzed the historical record. Below the fold are slides summarizing the results of her study of 323 non-violent and violent campaigns from 1900-2006. (There are twenty slides, so anybody with a slow connection may prefer to download a zipped file of the original PDF).
I do wonder if the movements that turned to violence may have known something about the regime, so that there might be some self-selection bias. But then who can know that much about a regime when starting a mass opposition movement?
It’s not enough to be a modern Nativist in Arizona, you have to be vigilant against facts and viewpoints that challenge your orthodoxy. University Professor of Law at Seattle University Richard Delgado and Research Professor of Law at Seattle University Jean Stefancic explain:
Last week, the Tucson Unified School District eliminated a popular Mexican American Studies program in local high schools that, in a short period of time, had done a lot of good. Established a few years ago pursuant to a desegregation decree and taught by charismatic teachers, the program had increased the graduation rate of Mexican-origin kids to 93 percent; nationally the rate is around 50. Since the Tucson school district is heavily Latino, that’s a lot of kids. Egged on by anti-immigrant groups, the Anglo-dominated administration decided that the program was un-American and divisive because it taught the kids about the War with Mexico, struggles for school desegregation, and Jim Crow laws under which people with brown skins had to sit in the balcony of movie theaters, take a back seat in restaurants, swim in public pools on one day of the week only, and work according to a dual wage scale, one for Anglos, the other for Mexicans.
…
When an outside audit gave the program a positive review, the district ended it anyway and, for good measure, ordered that teachers discontinue using texts like Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, Rodolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima, Rodolfo Acuna’s Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Elizabeth Martinez’s 500 Years of Chicano History, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and a book by the two of us, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, in classes where they had found an eager readership of brown teenagers.
To make sure that everyone got the point, the authorities directed the staff to collect and box seven of the most offensive books during class time so that the students would see them being packed up and carried to trucks bound for a distant book depository.
— Academe Blog, Book Banning in Arizona, via Kaimipono D. Wenger in Concurring Opinions.
The claim from this not-utterly-reliable source is that WikiLeaks to move servers offshore, maybe to Sealand.
I’m prepared to believe they are scouting for new locations, including maybe something ocean-based (although how you get adequate connectivity, I have to wonder), but I am quite dubious about the claim that they might go to “Sealand” the oil-derrick-based would-be micronation, since HavenCo I hear is basically collapsed. It would be interesting if it happened, though. For a good account of Sealand, see James Grimmelmann, Sealand , HavenCo, and the Rule of Law.
Meanwhile, count me in with the debunkers at Slashdot.
Firefox has a new version out (again, already), FF 10.
But Scrapbook Plus hasn’t been updated for it (yet, once again).
It’s especially annoying that the new version boasts that “Most add-ons are now compatible with new versions of Firefox by default”. Yah, except one of the ones I depend on the most.
OK, I shouldn’t complain. It’s free, excellent, and a great gift to us all from its creator, ” haselnuss”. Thank you sir. Thank you enormously for all your hard work. Now hurry up already.
Recent Bluessky Posts
Jotwell Blenderlaw